October 12, 2015
On November 26, Frank H. Wadsworth will have his 100th birthday. Wadsworth, who has been a forester in Puerto Rico since 1942, was elected into Sigma Xi membership in 1943, and is known as a pioneer in tropical forestry. He remains active and recently lectured at the Sigma Xi Puerto Rico chapter. Some of Wadsworth’s writings are available through his blog at frankhwadsworth.wordpress.com and through the Forest History Society at foresthistory.org. Wadsworth reflected on his career with American Scientist managing editor Fenella Saunders.
How would you describe the purpose of the field of forestry?
Forestry is not just cutting down trees. Forestry is responsible for sustainable protection of forests. We don’t deny that we’re using the forest. But the details of how to make trees grow and how to plant and care for them, I consider still the heart of what we’re trying to do.
What attracted you to Puerto Rico?
Tropical forests are more interesting than many others. We have more species in the national forest than I think in all the rest of [forest types] put together. It’s really a complex thing to have to study, and learning what each one does teaches you that they’re all different.
What scientific achievement of yours do you think had the most impact?
Learning the relationship between tree spacing and growing. One of the last papers I published showed that in the immediate surrounding of a tree, the density is related to different growth rates. If you know this, you can manage a forest and accelerate its growth.
You recently lectured at the Sigma Xi Puerto Rico chapter. What did you talk about?
I spoke to them about the importance of forests in their future. We have a mountainous island that is normally rainy, and when the island was deforested many years ago because we had agriculture, we had reservoirs that were mostly sedimented. Many of the trees have come back and now the sedimentation is much less. But there’s a very strong lesson there in that if you don’t have trees on the mountains, you don’t have any water and you’re going to have to leave the island.
Photo: Frank Wadsworth is a former director of the Tropical Forest Experiment Station of the USDA Forest Service within what is now the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico. This picture was taken during an international tropical forestry training course that he led sometime between 1955 and 1970. (Image courtesy of Caribbean Foresters.)